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I bricked my first TouchBar MacBook the day I received it, trying to do a factory reset as my company's security policies demanded. Not sure exactly how I trigg

I bricked my first TouchBar MacBook the day I received it, trying to do a factory reset as my company's security policies demanded. Not sure exactly how I triggered that state. Thankfully Apple took it back as a return. It should not be possible to brick a device by pushing the wrong button. I was shocked that this wasn't caught by anyone at Apple before release.

hnarn 6y ago
> It should not be possible to brick a device by pushing the wrong button So you think all Apple devices should be shipped without root? Or that anything disk-related should only be allowed through CLI as root?
- garmaine 6y ago
  No that’s not what I mean. I bricked the device. I’m not saying I wiped the hard disk and just can’t boot. I’m saying I put the machine in a state where it would NEVER AGAIN boot. Completely unrecoverable.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Adding another comment since the edit window on my sibling reply has elapsed. To be clear, I'm an IT professional who knows how to restore a device from boot media. I once managed a university computer lab, and wrote the linux-based image management software for 2000+ campus computers. I've written my own hobby operating, including the boot an initialization process. I thought any problem encountered reinstalling an OS is something I could handle. But that was not the case. Near as I could tell when I followed up with Apple after the incident, the boot process involved the security chip reading some data off the drive and validating it before handing off control. If that data (which is on the Apple reserved partition) was wiped, the firmware would not boot. And since the security chip was configured to not boot from media (the default state, IIRC), it was effectively bricked. So the very first generation of TouchBar MacBooks would not boot into recovery mode if you wipe the drive, nor would they boot any kind of recovery media. It's a state that required shipping to Apple for refurbishment to fix. It's my understanding that this was fixed in later models, perhaps even as a result of my incident.

hnarn 6y ago

> It should not be possible to brick a device by pushing the wrong button So you think all Apple devices should be shipped without root? Or that anything disk-related should only be allowed through CLI as root?

garmaine 6y ago
No that’s not what I mean. I bricked the device. I’m not saying I wiped the hard disk and just can’t boot. I’m saying I put the machine in a state where it would NEVER AGAIN boot. Completely unrecoverable.
garmaine 6y ago
Adding another comment since the edit window on my sibling reply has elapsed. To be clear, I'm an IT professional who knows how to restore a device from boot media. I once managed a university computer lab, and wrote the linux-based image management software for 2000+ campus computers. I've written my own hobby operating, including the boot an initialization process. I thought any problem encountered reinstalling an OS is something I could handle. But that was not the case. Near as I could tell when I followed up with Apple after the incident, the boot process involved the security chip reading some data off the drive and validating it before handing off control. If that data (which is on the Apple reserved partition) was wiped, the firmware would not boot. And since the security chip was configured to not boot from media (the default state, IIRC), it was effectively bricked. So the very first generation of TouchBar MacBooks would not boot into recovery mode if you wipe the drive, nor would they boot any kind of recovery media. It's a state that required shipping to Apple for refurbishment to fix. It's my understanding that this was fixed in later models, perhaps even as a result of my incident.